I’m still trying to wrap my non-physicist brain around this.
Okay, so t is redundant, mathematically speaking. It would be as if you had an infinite series of numbers, and you were counting from the beginning. The definition of the series is recursive, and defined as such that (barring new revelations in number theory) you can guarantee it will never repeat. As a trivial example, { t, i } = { 1, 1.1 }, { 2, 1.21 }, { 3, 1.4641 }.… t is redundant, in the sense that you don’t need it there to calculate the next item in the series, and subtracting it makes the definition of the series simpler.
I also keep thinking back to Conway’s game of life—the time parameter (or generation, at least in xlife) is superfluous to a description of the “universe”. The cells automatize (?) identically regardless of the generation. It’s only the actual description of the playfield, combined with the rules for creating the next generation, that could be said to “exist” (at least for a glider physicist).
But in both those things there’s still a concept of “successive states”, and a “before” and “after” situation. It’s the (allegedly) objective label for progress through successive states that’s redundant. The idea of a block or crystal universe being “real” seems like a map/territory confusion, at least the way I’m understanding it—that you could statically load up all the states of the universe into the memory of a sufficiently powerful n-dimensional computer, and that alone (with no processing per se) would be sufficient to create our experiences of existing inside the universe.
I’m still trying to wrap my non-physicist brain around this.
Okay, so t is redundant, mathematically speaking. It would be as if you had an infinite series of numbers, and you were counting from the beginning. The definition of the series is recursive, and defined as such that (barring new revelations in number theory) you can guarantee it will never repeat. As a trivial example, { t, i } = { 1, 1.1 }, { 2, 1.21 }, { 3, 1.4641 }.… t is redundant, in the sense that you don’t need it there to calculate the next item in the series, and subtracting it makes the definition of the series simpler.
I also keep thinking back to Conway’s game of life—the time parameter (or generation, at least in xlife) is superfluous to a description of the “universe”. The cells automatize (?) identically regardless of the generation. It’s only the actual description of the playfield, combined with the rules for creating the next generation, that could be said to “exist” (at least for a glider physicist).
But in both those things there’s still a concept of “successive states”, and a “before” and “after” situation. It’s the (allegedly) objective label for progress through successive states that’s redundant. The idea of a block or crystal universe being “real” seems like a map/territory confusion, at least the way I’m understanding it—that you could statically load up all the states of the universe into the memory of a sufficiently powerful n-dimensional computer, and that alone (with no processing per se) would be sufficient to create our experiences of existing inside the universe.